love is christian
sex is pagan
love is a farm
sex is an invasion
love is divine
sex is animal
love is bossa nova
sex is carnival

Rita Lee

Allison: Do you believe in love? Please, do not be pesimistic about it. You have to believe in it because it’s the most marvellous and pure feeling that a human being can have!!!

Love,love,love!!!! Shakespeare was always inspired by true love!!!!

Love you, love others, love yourself!!!!

Love is universal. We all have our own interpretations of what love is and where it comes from. We grow up being told different interpretations of what love is, and we often become lost at different moments of our lives.

Love sometimes seems like a puzzle. We struggle throughout our lives striving to put the pieces together.

If you continue to strive to express love, you will discover that you are not lost or afraid. Instead you will be at peace and full of joy.

No matter what the circumstance is, love as much as you can. Keep on loving until you can’t love anymore. And then keep on loving. =)

All you need is love. =)

Matt =)

For me, love is respect, desire to know, to understand and help the well being of one person.

Some people say that you can´t love someone unless you love yourself. Now I think I understand it. If you don´t love yourself you will only want to be with somebody else to love you, but not to love him/her. But when you love yourself, you are able to open to others and love them and respect them despite their attitude towards you. That doesn´t mean that you must let others hurt you, but when you love and you´re sure about yourself that´s much less likely to happen.

I often wonder what it is you aren’t talking about.

Heh. I was just thinking of love. I am trying to get past my own strong feelings. When it comes to love. . . I feel like Charlie Brown at the beginning of football season. (far out, White Rabbit just started playing on my classic rock Internet radio station, followed by Sunshine of Your love) Now it seems that I’ll just have to get myself to trust Lucy again.

Hey Allison. I haven’t been in a relationship yet, but have had my share of crushes. Being in love is incredibly frightening. Your stomach gets tied up in knots and you can’t breathe or move. Talk about being stupid in front of the one person you want to impress! These are great quotes! I enjoyed your outlook on love aswell! Going on a trip tommorow to Minneapolis. Very excited. But it shall be a long ride on the bus! I’m going with my art class and we will be visiting a couple of art museums!
Have a great week & weekend!
BrittanyXOXOXOXO

I think Love will always be one of the most confusing things to me.Maybe until i truly learn how to ,it will be?!…and Love is supposed to be a natural human emotion.If it is why is so hard for some of us to do?! Some people who’ve never been loved come to never love anyone,some do….See?….im even more confused now!

I just posted a story in your “Scribbles” section in this site’s forum that ends with this quote:

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (“The Bible” NRSV, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

“Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.”

Miguel De Cervantes

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go. Things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right. You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”

Marilyn Monroe

“Love is the way you feel about yourself when you are with the one person who you think you love.”

unknown

“When you have it, you trust it, you take a chance on it. You’d do anything to keep it, no matter what the cost.”

Clark Kent

I don’t like absolute quotes. People who are incomplete CAN become whole or more complete through love. We are all incomplete in many ways and we can become whole through community. We can accept our weaknesses and let others be strong for us. We can accept our strengths and be strong for others. We can look at some of our weaknesses and grow out of them. There are worlds and worlds of possibilities out there. If two people come together and each is complete in themselves, YES that can work. But it can fail because neither really has any need for the other. Look at how elements combine into compounds. Missing electrons in the outer rings of the atoms in two or more different elements attract and combine to make something more stable — synergistically stronger that they were apart.

I don’t think that people should embrace being weak for the sake of finding someone to save them. I think we should try to be the best person we can be. But a person who is strong and totally independant (if such a person exists) doesn’t need anyone. And wanting an audience or someone to entertain them or a relationship only indicates a need and that the person isn’t at a stage of completeness. Once a person is complete, no one has anything to offer that person anymore or has anything special to offer that person.

====

On unconditional love … is that a good thing? I don’t want someone who will love me if I decide to be a monster. I want someone that loves me when I am trying to be what I can be or being myself. If I decide to take some dark path or compromise what I believe in, I want the person I am with to tell me that they love me for what I was and what I wanted to be but may not love the person I will be if I lose myself. In times of weakness, I want to be called back to my path, not allowed to feel supported on a road to darkness. If someone loved me as I am … and then loved me when I became someone totally different, then why did she chose me in the first place and not someone totally different? If she would love me no matter who I become, that means she would love anyone … so how is her love for me special?

David Hayes Says:
“I don’t want someone who will love me if I decide to be a monster.”

Why not? They should love you all the way to the lethal injection gurney. Maybe even help you get there with all regrets.

love “evol”ves, but never loses the permanence that is inherent in it. I laugh when people say they fell “out of love” for someone. You never fall out of love. There are different levels of love, but there is no falling out of it.

No one is complete except for God. Everyone is incomplete in some form or another. We are dependent upon a lot of things to survive: food, water, shelter. The majority of us seek companionship, which implies dependence in some form or another. This is not a negative. It’s when dependence is unbalanced that it becomes destructive. But, that’s like any facet of life in general.

IMO, there are only two cases of unconditional love that exist in this world. “Unconditional” assumes that someone loves another without regard to the other person’s behavior. Those two forms are: a mother towards her infant child; a true believer and his love for God.

Peter Gabriel has a great song: “The Book Of Love”. Listen to his lyrics and it’s overall message. “No one can lift the damn thing.”

Love is just so complicated and amazing. Trying to comprehend it gives me a headache! I honestly think it’s one of those things we arent meant to understand….but feel.

Love is that warm feeling deep inside. When the world is falling apart….those that you love are your stability, your air…your very reason for existing.

Love is everything….

I couldnt agree more with your second quote. I personally refused to date while I was in high school because I’m a firm believer that if you dont know who you are….or dont love yourself, there’s no way someone else can truly love you. Of course you think you can make it work….but just as the first quote said…there will always be something missing.

Seek out love in yourself first, and others second….because once you can truly look in the mirror and say “I love you” all of your other relationships will be that much stronger.

Beautiful poem and one that truly has me thinking about the definition of love as well.

“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are
making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.

I love you for putting your hand into my heaped up heart, and passing over
all the foolish and frivolous and weak things which you cannot help dimly
seeing there, and for drawing out into the light all the beautiful, radiant
belongings, that no one else had looked quite far enough to find.
“I love you for ignoring the possibilities of the fool and weakling in me,
and for laying firm hold on the possibilities of good in me. I love you for
closing your eyes to the discords in me, and for adding to the music in me
by worshipful listening.
“I love you because you are helping me to make of the lumber of my life not a
tavern but a Temple, and of the words of my every day not a reproach but a
song.
“I love you because you have done more than any creed could have done to make
me good, and more than any fate could have done to make me happy. You have
done it just by being yourself. Perhaps that is what being a friend means
after all.” (Roy Croft)

A dear friend sent me this quote and it spoke more deeply to me than any other definition or rumination on love that I have ever read. I suppose it’s because I have experienced these feelings with a handful of people in my life, the one most enduring being my husband. True love abolishes fear so that the one who desires to be known opens unabashedly…fearlessly. True love creates space around your heart…leaving room to grow, patiently encouraging that growth. Neither my husband nor I were at this place when we met or when we married…it has been an evolution, still abounding in change. Painful, yes, unbelievably…love is painful. But true love endures. To understand it seems illusive, but to feel it, to be loved like that is freeing, it opens your heart like nothing else.

love…
R

Hammad Said (On May 27th, 2009 at 6:08 pm):

“No one is complete except for God.”

I thought to say this too … yet God felt the need (desire?) to create the angels and then all of creation and then us. Perhaps our desire to have relationships stems from being created in His image.

Love rocks!

I’ve been in love a bunch of times, and to wildly varying degrees.

Love is such a subjective emotional state of mind, and is truly different for everyone. Whether it’s the blush of new love or a relationship that has lasted decades, love ebbs and flows like the moon driven tides. It’s never the same thing twice and it’s never the same for two people.

Y’know what else love is like? “Space Mountain” at Disneyland.

The anticipation and excitement leading up to getting on the ride. The heart-pounding thrill as you race around each blind corner, not knowing where the next drop comes, the release as you roll back to the loading platform, and finally the little tinge of sadness as you walk away, knowing that it’s all over.

But guess what? The great thing about love, just like “Space Mountain”, is that you can run around and get back in line and experience it all over again.

And while your at it, grab a Fast Pass!

Tennyson was sooooo right when he wrote:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Allison, if this came up for personal introspection, take it from someone who has a few more years in the saddle, don’t just love…LOVE in big, stupid, carefree, sloppy capital letters!

Don’t be afraid of love. Enjoy love. Learn from love. Let love shape you into the person you will be for the rest of your life.

Love is nothing to be feared. It’s something to be…well…loved.

Love is what you make of it to me love can have many meanings .
lust
obsession
vanity
entrapment

A tale from Attar of Nishapur:

The lover knocked at the door of his beloved. “Who knocks?” said the beloved from within. “It is I,” said the lover. “Go away. This house will not hold you and me.”

The rejected lover went away into the desert. There he meditated for months on end, pondering the words of the beloved. Finally he returned and knocked at the door again.

“Who knocks?”
“It is you.”

The door was immediately opened.

(From a book of stories collected together by Anthony de Mello, S.J., entitled “The Song of the Bird”)

There is this brilliant theologian who I admire named Slavoj Zizek, who talks a lot about love. He basically says that love is seeing perfection in imperfection. It is not simply looking past faults, it is seeing them and accepting them. (you can see him talk about it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3x5X67OWj8)
In another one of the video interviews with him, he points out that love is also a very violent action. I would agree, it’s beautiful, but it IS very violent. When you love something, when you love someone, you are putting them in front of other things. You are saying I love this more than this. Which inherently is a violent action, because you have then said you like something LESS than something else…It creates an imbalance in the universe. (Alright, just warning you, I’m a Religious Studies major and we did a whole segment this semester based off of the topic Christianity and the concept of love, (next semester is Buddhism! Fun stuff! ) so I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent here…) Take the story of Jesus for instance. He dies on the cross, to save humanity, a sort of ultimate sacrifice to end the need for sacrifice, an act done out of love. But because of God’s love of humanity, it creates an inherent violence in the world, because everything else that exists has been ignored or it becomes retroactive continuity. (In other words the plot of the story, or rather life, gets completely rewritten in order to have the new ending make sense.) .
However there’s another theory… if God created the world and humanity with free will, he initially threw things off balance himself. Because if God loves (according to Zizek) the world enough to give it free will, then obviously his was the first transgression, and it was his action that threw the world from the beginning. Going with this theory perhaps Jesus was not meant to not throw the world off balance, but to get it back on track. Yet, still by defeating death, he managed to jostle things yet again. And possibly the second coming will not, as it has been prophesied to be, put things in their place. Perhaps this event could push things yet again to a state of further imbalance. On the other side of the coin, one could argue that if God first created, God himself would have to be an imbalance, in a balanced universe. In a place where there was “nothing”, God was obviously “something” and therefore, the initial imbalance. Anything he created, it stands to reason, would therefore also be imbalanced. As it says in the bible, in Genesis, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness” (NRSV). So straight off the bat, right from the very beginning of the bible, we are slammed with dichotomies. Nihilo vs. God; Heavens vs. Earth; Light vs. Dark and Good vs. Bad. So with this argument, is it even possible to have balance, or is the universe as we know it (at least one viewed through a Christian lens) doomed to be forever an unbalanced, imperfect place?
Or is it like C.S. Lewis stated in his book Perelandra? “There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre”. Perhaps there seems to be imbalance, because it is all balance; there seems to be no perfection, because it is all perfection. As humans, we have an innate need to separate things; we have a need to look at the world two different ways and see and comprehend things in a sort of dualistic manner. Perhaps we misunderstand because we cannot possibly comprehend the intricacy of the universe in which we live. As we watch the world through a dim vale, we only see brief glimmers of reality, and these are far from perfect at best. We relate to these truths in metaphor, because we do not know the extent of their true nature, and can only relate them insofar as what we think we are certain of. As Lewis stated about the Great Dance that is our world, our universe, our cosmos, “So with the Great Dance. Set your eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true”. We latch on to what we think we see, and hold it to be truth because it provides comfort to us finite beings in a world full of the possibility of infinites.
Wow…sorry I really rambled there…and I think I’m way off from where I started…sorry about that…I should never be allowed to have a computer late at night…I tend to start on long rambling conversations about the universe!
Anywho, hope your week is going well!
-Allie

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love”.

- Neil Gaiman

 David,

The King James translation of those verses more closely differentiates between the different types of love as expressed in Greek by separate words.

4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Wow…I’m so enjoying everybody’s thoughts and quotes on love. Beautiful life, beautiful experience…to love, to feel, to hurt even…to expand our capacity, to open and embrace. Loving is a journey all it’s own. It takes a lifetime to figure out all the different stages and lessons of love. But that’s what life is all about and loving is no different…finding the one to take this journey with is part of the ups and downs we learn from.

Amanda N. shared this quote:

“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin6. “Love is the beauty of the soul.”
–St. Augustine”

This makes me want to scream “Yes!” This is the nature of true love, if we are at a place of surrender to it, to evolve, to grow into something rooted and firm, transcending even the initial thrill of first love. Thank you, thank you for sharing this…very poignant.

By the way thanks Vanessa. You totally reminded me to check the Crossed Wires website.